


The Skin We're In

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-11
Updated: 2012-12-11
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:12:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Men and women are the only animals that blush.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Skin We're In

At first, they forget how to be. 

"Hello," the Doctor calls out, but the evening greeting is lost with a slammed door and a loud curse. Files fall to the floor and the flurry of papers fill in the space where his words would go.

"I--" Rose starts, but her voice fades with the morning light. A moment, then she smiles beningly, reads the newspaper, sips her tea. A clock ticks on the wall. 

The air around them thickens with conversations that have yet to begin. The Doctor is new and bruised, fresh from Bad Wolf Bay and placed in the company of a girl who is older now, and not as gentle as she once was. They are easily hurt; they can easily hurt one another . Easier than learning how to walk in new heels, or letting your eyes adjust to the dark, Rose thinks.

It's like learning a language, this dance that they're dancing. A stumble, a twist. A lightbulb that flickers, almost there, almost lit.

But never quite making it, not really. 

They don't talk about applegrass and bazoolium. They don't talk about burning Daleks and bad wolves. They don't talk about one heart or darker roots, or age lines that carve the thin skin at their eyes, their lips. Rose supposes that for a human, forever is too long to comprehend. But for a time-traveler who loves a human, forever is not long enough.

(And that's the both of them, now, left to watch each other wither and die. A fun fact that permeates each cough, each aging cell.)

Perhaps that is why they don't speak of the future. They just don't know how.

Oh, but in the end, the pair of them have always been interlopers. There are languages they've learned to use when all other forms of communication are unknown.

In stops and starts, they try:

His finger skims the pale, vein-lined expanse of her naked wrist during supper, dragging over the throb of her pulse point, eliciting shiver after shiver like the warning bells of an impending earthquake. A scratch of his nails, and her heels drive into the floor, thighs clenched and toes curled.

She folds into his side at bedtime, hair smelling of forest and jasmine, the soft weight of her heavy breasts pressing into his arm. Her skin goes prickly and tight when her mouth brushes his neck where he hasn't shaved and he gropes for her blindly, something restless in the twitch of his knees.

They are all downcast lashes and burning lips, weighed down with the perpetual feeling of hanging off a cliff's edge, dangling like a ribbon in the wind with a breath always half-started and half-stopped in the lungs. Like they're new sculptures, clay skin barely dry and exposed to the air, sensitive and fragile, bone delicate in structure and frame. Shy. Young. When they chance an honest look at each other in unguarded moments, the blood pumps to their skin like roses blooming in the snow.

On the coldest of days, Rose touches her palms to her cheeks, and they always come away warm.

Her body reacts to him like a livewire sparking into the night, but he looks at her with the eyes of someone who has never seen the sun before and is suddenly bathed in light. Fear. Awe. Reluctance. And just the smallest touch of incomprehension, when once upon a time, she was the thing he knew best in the world.

Rose is so weary of being a stranger. In this world, in the family that her real mother and fake father and inexplicable brother have started. In this duo of theDoctorandRose, which is not like the one she knows from before. 

There is a skip in that old rhythm that, try as she might, Rose cannot master. Her foot catches and she falls.

And falls, and falls.

In the spaces between, there are no arguments, nor promised adventures, nor banter. Only the gestures that never say anything, or if they do, speak of a widening gulf, of hands that never quite meet and movies that don't end well. 

So Rose begins a conversation that they will both understand.

"Kiss me," she demands, on a day like any other, except for the distinct sense of striking an arrow through the middle of a bewilderingly vast target. 

She tugs his collar open and slips away his tie, a soft hiss of silk against cloth that sends a tremor through her legs because it is visceral and undeniable and how could anyone not know what that sound signifies?

"Rose--" the Doctor says, voice rough and expression wild. He's always a bit wild now, this Doctor, and lost. His gaze is shot with constellations that no one knows but him, so much so that Rose swears could travel ten thousand new universes in his eyes. A domesticated Doctor he's not, this roamer. This nomad. This creature who will never stay still, will never stay long, will never stay. 

It could hurt, the realization. But for the first time in a long time, Rose feels like maybe she won't stay either. That maybe his isn't the only wandering heart around here. That maybe when he feels the urge to get up and go--he won't leave her to relearn the gravel of different roads alone. 

For the first time in a long time, Rose looks up and lets herself sink into him, the sun meeting the horizon line, the rain dropping into the sea. 

_Yes_ , her body laughs, _You remember this._

Her skin tingles at the memory of double heartbeats, but there's something more urgent tingling in the soles of her feet as she presses her palm to the vee of his exposed throat, where the skin is warm and--

\--she lean in to lick a delicate line along his Adam's apple--

\--salty.

"Kiss me," she says again, but this time it isn't a request or a command. It's a simple statement of fact, because he will, of course he will. There's no other way this story could start. 

"Kiss me," a chant, yearning like the warm yellow turn of the moon at night. Her lips are slick and and soft under his, clinging to the shape of his mouth as she speaks. She is unafraid. 

"Kiss me," she whispers, one more time.

So he does.


End file.
